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Illustration of a Gin Sour

Illustration — generated, not photographed

Gin Sour

Lemon leads and sugar follows close enough to keep it drinkable, while egg white thickens the texture and rounds off the acid. The foam is cool and near-tasteless; the sour underneath is bright and sharp. Juniper has to push through all that citrus, so a dry, assertive gin holds its shape best.

50 ml
gin
25 ml
lemon
15 ml
sugar
15 ml
egg white

Measures — house pour, not sourced

Dry shaken then shaken with ice, strained, foam on top.

The drink and how it got here

The sour is not a cocktail so much as a shape that other cocktails are cut from: a spirit, a citrus, a sweetener. Jerry Thomas set the family down in his 1862 How to Mix Drinks, the first cocktail book anyone printed, and the gin version is simply that template with gin in it — gin, lemon juice, sugar. It was on bars well before Prohibition and was still a fixture of the 1940s.

How tight the template is shows up in what happens when you add one thing. Pour carbonated water into a gin sour and it stops being a gin sour: it is a gin fizz, under a different name, with the same three ingredients underneath. Nothing about the base changed. The category did.

The other variation stays inside the family. Egg white, shaken in, whips to a dense pale head and comes out on top of the drink — it adds almost no flavour and changes the whole texture, rounding the acid and giving it a weight it does not otherwise have. Whether a sour is served with it has never quite been settled, which is why so many bars will ask.

So there are two guides here, not three. This drink has not drifted decade by decade the way the Martini did; the only real fork is the egg. First the plain one Thomas would recognise, then the same drink with foam on it. Add soda and you have left — that is a fizz, and it gets its own page when it gets one.

Read from Sour (cocktail) — Wikipedia (History, Variations)

The plain sour

1862 — the family recipe, with gin in it · Sour (cocktail) — Wikipedia, History

  1. Pouring a clear colourless spirit from a plain blank bottle into a metal cocktail shaker standing on a dark walnut bar top.

    1 Fifty of gin. Three ingredients in a sour and this is the only one you actually taste the brand of.

  2. A cut half lemon being squeezed over the shaker, juice running in, a small plain jug of clear syrup standing beside it.

    2 Twenty-five of lemon, fifteen of sugar. Two to one, sour over sweet — move that ratio and you are making a different drink.

  3. A sealed metal cocktail shaker held raised just after a hard shake, heavily frosted and beaded with condensation.

    3 Ice and shake it hard. Citrus drinks are shaken, stirring leaves them dull and warm-tasting.

  4. Straining a cloudy pale-gold drink from the shaker into a chilled stemmed coupe, a strip of lemon peel resting on the bar beside it.

    4 Strain it off the ice. Cloudy is correct here — that haze is the lemon, and a clear sour means somebody used a bottle.

With egg white

The fork that stayed inside the family · Sour (cocktail) — Wikipedia, Variations

  1. Pouring a clear colourless spirit from a plain blank bottle into a metal cocktail shaker on a dark walnut bar top.

    1 Same fifty of gin, same lemon, same sugar. Everything that follows is about texture, not flavour.

  2. A cut half lemon being squeezed over the shaker, juice running in, a small plain jug of clear syrup standing beside it.

    2 Lemon and sugar in as before. The egg goes on top of a finished sour, it does not replace any part of it.

  3. A viscous clear egg white being poured from a small plain jug into the shaker.

    3 Fifteen of egg white. It tastes of nothing — what it does is thicken the drink and take the edge off the acid.

  4. A sealed metal cocktail shaker held raised mid-shake, dry and unfrosted, with no condensation on the metal at all.

    4 Shake it first with no ice at all. This is the dry shake, and it is the whole trick — the egg needs to whip before anything goes cold.

  5. The same shaker held raised just after a second shake, now heavily frosted and beaded with condensation.

    5 Now add ice and shake again. Cold and dilution second, foam first — do it the other way round and you get bubbles instead of a head.

  6. Straining a pale gold drink into a coupe, a dense white foam cap forming smooth and matte across the surface.

    6 Pour it slowly and the foam sets up on its own, smooth and matte. Let it stand half a minute before the first sip.

These images are generated, not photographed

From the collection — 3 bottles

  • KIKU

    Apple Gin

    The tart apple in KIKU does half the work of the lemon, and 42% stands up to egg white and sugar without thinning out.

  • Tohi

    Aronia Infused

    Aronia's tannic grip and colour need lemon and egg white to soften them — the berry does the work a liqueur usually would.

  • Warner's

    Rhubarb

    The rhubarb in Warner's already brings the tartness, so lemon and egg white round it into something soft without burying the juniper.